Founding Robot Learning Research Lead

Job overview

The Founding Robot Learning Research Lead role is onsite in San Francisco, CA. Compensation is not specified. The role supports Origin’s development of autonomous robots for interior construction and its Construction Action Models for unstructured job sites. The lead expands learned components of Origin’s robot system while ensuring they are production-safe. The work spans research, data collection, model training, evaluation, and deployment on physical robots, with each research project tied to a deployment milestone.

What you'll do

• Define the technical roadmap for robot learning and embodied AI
• build and deploy learned policies for mobile manipulation and contact-rich tasks
• develop imitation learning, reinforcement learning, VLA, and learning-from-demonstration systems
• adapt foundation models
• build data collection, training, evaluation, and deployment loops
• develop simulation and sim-to-real strategies
• integrate learned policies with the ROS2 stack
• optimize edge inference
• debug policies on physical robots
• establish evaluation across simulation, datasets, and robot experiments
• build and mentor the Robot Learning team.

What we're looking for

Skills & competencies

robot learning research lead

san francisco ca

origin

embodied ai

autonomous robots

imitation learning

reinforcement learning

vla

ros2

nvidia isaac sim

edge deployment

Work arrangement

• Weekend coverage required

Why this role

Research projects have deployment milestones; the role is explicitly not a lab position. Origin reports robots deployed on live construction sites in New York City.

About the employer

Origin is hiring for this role. Industry: Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Nanotechnology and Biotechnology). Sector: 54.